TBC glad cutoffs ranged from 150+ teams.
WOTLK glad cutoffs ranged from around 40-50
Cata ranged around 20-35 and now there is hardly 20 on anny BGs in EU.
The pvp aspect of the game is dying atleast.

What does that mean? The game is dying? No.

RBGs and Arenas split up the PvP community, many people who used to play arenas don't find it fun and go to RBGs instead.

BGs are far more casual friendly so the step from random BGs to rated makes the casual players feel like they've got a clue of whats going on in them, BGs to Arenas aren't as forgiving and easy to get in to which makes RBGs the obvious choice for a casual player when he wants to get in to rated PvP.

Blizzard really needs to help new players get in to Arenas(and RBGs for that matter) if they want to PvP community to grow, link arena streams in the launcher, make a stream page on Battle.net or implement some sort of tutorial in game so new players don't feel so clueless once they enter.

Random Queue for War Games would be the "Random BG" version for Arenas and would help new players practice and encourage them to try 3v3 random Queue since Skirmishes were a complete fiasco in that matter, only 2v2 was played when Skirmishes were active..

And of course a normal spectator client in the game so players can watch other players and pick up things, with the "ghost mode" they used on the EU regionals in other words, that you can see the players action bar, to see what spells he used when etc.

Honestly, PvP has been declining for a long time. Even though PvP players only make up a small portion of the game's population, any sort of competitive play is usually one of the top things that brings attention and more players to the game. WoW being dropped from MLG had a pretty big impact on the game's pvp future, as it wasn't really spectator friendly and the pvp balance has always been horrible since BC.

Current season balance really didn't help PVP aspect of this game. Yes changes are coming but the damage was already done. From one season with OP classes to another. Its like almost 1 year of very bad balance. On top of that with current amount of people playing 0.5 % that get glad is not just not enough, wit this participation it should be 1 %.

2v2 skirmish was always about testing spec/addons/macros but 3v3 skirmish was never implemented properly right from the beginning.
Adding wargames is for such a small minority they should've just given back skirmishes with random solo queue and maybe even mmr matching.

If they had randomly created rbg/arena for 1500s bracket, people would solo queue all day. Additionally, having the option to preform to actually get high rated, would be a lot more like vanilla pvp. Back then everyone did pvp as far as i know.

2v2 skirmish was always about testing spec/addons/macros but 3v3 skirmish was never implemented properly right from the beginning.
Adding wargames is for such a small minority they should've just given back skirmishes with random solo queue and maybe even mmr matching.

If they had randomly created rbg/arena for 1500s bracket, people would solo queue all day. Additionally, having the option to preform to actually get high rated, would be a lot more like vanilla pvp. Back then everyone did pvp as far as i know.

I wonder if this would be a way forward for wow arena, like a solo queue similar to dota 2/league of legends. Maybe if blizzard worked a bit on the in game voice chat and then implemented something like this, i think pvp would have a big big increase in activity.

I think the current rating system(battlegroups etc) is completely flawed and does not work with the game currently, but a global team 3v3, solo queue ladder etc could really work, or at least only 1-3 battlegroups, like eu west eu east russia, again similar to dota 2/lol

it's funny when people on aj think so many subscribers quit the game because pvp is shit in their eyes.
the percentage of people who play the game only for pvp is maybe 1%, so the amount of subscribers won't go high or down because of the status of pvp.
pve decides everything, pvp doesn't affect the number of subscribers at all.

But, around the end of cata they said something about half of the players pvp'ing regularly.

My guess is, that the decline in player numbers has nothing to do with the state of the game, not even close.

I think the whole gaming community got over-satisfied with mmo-like games and similar business models over the past years.

Before WoW came out, there were only a handful of mmo's (DAoC, Ultima and so on, it was a niche in gaming).
After the WoW release, the market exploded and now we have like an endless number of games which we can chose from.
To be honest, world of warcraft managed this franchise pretty good and I think the numbers blizzard could toss at us could speak for themselves, but every mmo roughly follows the same principles.
So, now we have this mass of games, which are pretty similar in mechanics and every 2 months there is another one coming out. The reason games like guild wars 2 were not successful has nothing to do with the game itself and its flaws, it's just that we've already seen everything they could throw at us.

The only reason why WoW holds it ground is the simple fact that it still got an edge over resembling games, plus players tend to be lazy in their gaming behaviors. (you can observe this when players switch to another game but immediately switch back after a couple of days)
But after 8 years, every game, how perfect it may be (or not), starts to lose its 'magic' and the mentioned overall dissociation from mmo's or monthly pay games is starting to take its toll.

My thesis is that the mmo hype is somewhat over for quite a while now, and even the big names are starting to feel this shift.
The decline will continue, sometimes slower and sometimes faster, that's how it is.
I still like WoW and all the other mmo's I played and as a gamer I'll always think back to the good times I had with these.

Challenge mode isn't a challenge for hardcore players, don't be stupid. Everything in this game is for casuals. There is no content for anyone hardcore and this is why players are quitting. Casuals will never play as much as hardcore players. They just start here and there and then go again. Blizzard thinks that because there are more casuals than hardcore players they should cater for them but casuals are way more likely to quit since they don't depend their life on WoW like hardcore players do. TBC and WOTLK were the two best expansions because there was more hardcore content, especially SWP. Ulduar was an amazing raid for hardcore raiders.

Yet your armory shows you have never completed a challenge mode

From my experience being a hardcore player (when I was in college on a light semester) to now, it would be insane for blizzard to design a game to cater to hardcore players. When I was hardcore I was probably playing close to 30 hours a week pushing for server firsts and running up to glad in multiple brackets. How many people do you actually think have THAT much time to play this game?